virtonomicsfandomcom-20200215-history
Branding
Attractiveness of a particular product for buyers is characterized not only by the price and quality, but also the degree of brand awareness of it's producer in the city. Goods with higher brands are more attractive for buyers to acquire them. Brand is formed by advertising products (goods) by the producer in a region, or a single city. One cannot advertise goods produced by others. Product Marking Every product is released from factory with no mark and unbranded. After the first advertisement campaign in any city of the realm the products and all consequent productions are assumed to be labeled with producer's name. please notice we are not talking about branding, just marking the product with the name of company. This can be verified by checking the reports: My Company -> Reports -> Marketing Report -> Stores Assortment The table illustrates all the products in all company's stores' inventory. Moving the mouse pointer over coloured rectangles will reveal the original producer of the goods. If the products are mixed from different producers you will see all the producers names with the quantity of their share. Game engine saves the names of the producers and it's quality until it is sold to end-user and removed from realm database, even if they are mixed. As you noticed some of goods might not be branded in your location, but they still carry the name of manufacturer. Product Branding Advertising products (goods) in the region is carried out from the company's office in the region. To start an advertisement campaign in a city/region open the office that controls the subdivisions in that region and click on "Advertising" control tab. A list of the products that your company produces with information about current add campaign opens. By clicking on the name of the product that you want to advertise you will be directed to the campaign page, where you can select the target city(-ies) and campaign media: internet, press, outdoor advertising, radio and TV (in order of low audience to high audience). Each media has certain costs and a minimum price that advertisement agency expects. The more powerful the media is, the less the cost of advertisement will be, but advertisement agency expects you to purchase more. After the first update, the product becomes branded to some value depending on how many contacts have been contacted. if the campaign runs for a few updates, the brand value grows higher and higher until it reaches the limit. the limit is shown by a text at the beginning of the page that reads: "not less XXXX$ per week, TV advertising in cities, or XXXX in the number of contacts." if the number of contacts in this text equals the number of contacts in campaign then continuing advertisement campaign will not produce more brand anymore, but helps keeping current status of brand in the given city. Cutting advertisement campaign leads to gradual downgrade of brand. To review the branding progress, one can visit above page everyday. But there is a page that allows to review all company brands in a single layout: My Company -> Reports -> Marketing Report -> Brands in Cities by clicking any of the brand values higher than 0.00, the page is redirected to relevant office advertising page. Tips & Tricks - Effects of the advertisement campaign only shows up after realm update. - The higher the marketing top manger qualification is, the more audience can be contacted with same amount of payment. So it's worth to grow the qualification. - Low office efficiency affects advertisement campaign's efficiency adversely and drastically. Optimum level of efficiency is 100%. If the effectiveness of advertising campaign is less than 100%, the advertising budget needs to be reviewed as part of the cost of advertising is thrown to the wind. - Advertising goods will impose workload on marketing manager in the same way that advertising a subdivision does. To determine the total load, simply add the costs of both types of advertisement. - Advertisement campaign can be started as soon as factory is under construction if the factory have been ordered with the same specialization. - Non-retail items, such as all semi-materials (excluding wool-fabrics), tractors, air-crafts... cannot be branded. - Branding commodities and ordinary low-price goods may not produce a lot of advantage. On the contrary, branding luxury and high-price products can be a deciding advantage in retail competitions, especially in fashionable districts and wealthy cities where people really pay for branded goods. - The company that has produced the goods and advertised them, does not have to sell them by her own to make the brand effective. If the goods are sold to any other company to be resold in their stores, those goods will be delivered with original producers mark and brand value. - Brands has no effect on sales of restaurants and medical centres. As soon as the goods are shipped into these enterprises, the brand becomes a hidden property of the product. Shipping the goods back to a warehouse activates the brand property again. Links to Virtonomics Forums # Newbies Guide to Virtonomics, Lesson 4, Branding # Advertising Efficiency, Question # How to increase advertising efficiency? # Advertisement Media # How Contact Numbers Work